In the cloud computing world, preserving a choice of clouds is critical. The risks of being locked into a single cloud are substantial. Pricing, reliability, geographic location and compliance can all vary between clouds. Business requirements will evolve over time, necessitating the ability to move between clouds, whether public to private, private to public or between public cloud providers.

Cloud Foundry Core – the Vehicle for Cloud Portability

Cloud Foundry Core provides both a baseline of common capabilities and an open mechanism that allows anyone to instantly validate and confirm those capabilities are present on any Cloud Foundry instance. The components of a PaaS offering that applications depend on (runtimes, application services for data access and messaging) form the baseline of common capabilities. Cloud Foundry Core defines specific versions for each of these capabilities. Cloud Foundry Core introduces a system of current, next, and deprecated versions to provide access to feature innovation, enhanced performance and greater stability as application services and runtimes continue to evolve.

Why Preserving Cloud Portability is Critical

Preserving cloud portability is imperative in the cloud era. Being locked into a single cloud restricts the ability to respond to changing needs now and in the future. Cloud portability allows movement between providers that better suit pricing needs or can offer better quality of service. It provides the flexibility to pick and choose where to deploy applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, and latency constraints. A choice of public or private clouds is key to adding capacity for managing growth as well as dealing with “cloudbursting” scenarios for optimizing spending.

Commitment to Cloud Portability

Cloud Foundry is committed to preserving cloud portability, now and in the future. In this context, it provides an abstraction layer for running applications without the application being aware of where it is executing. In Cloud Foundry, the components of a PaaS offering that applications depend on (e.g. runtimes, messaging, data access) are built using open development frameworks and technologies (Java, Ruby, Node.js, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis). Moving applications between Cloud Foundry instances is simple with the vmc command line tool.

Tier 3 – enterprise-grade IaaS and PaaS in one comprehensive platform, with support for global deployments

Uhuru Software – the Uhuru AppCloud brings the best of .NET and Open Source together.

Ultimately Cloud Foundry Core is the focal point for a network of compatible Cloud Foundry instances and distributions to take shape and grow, preserving choice for the developers and consumers of applications.

Summary

Cloud Foundry remains as committed as ever to Open PaaS and we appreciate the tremendous support from our ecosystem of partners and strong open source contributions from the developer community. Through Cloud Foundry Core we will continue to deliver on our commitment to preserve cloud application portability.